


Get in the Wild

by The_Exile



Category: Radiant Historia
Genre: Gen, Giant Spiders, Post-Game(s), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 16:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19908634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Gafka refused the Beast King's Blessing but was not completely unaffected by the powers sealed inside the Beast's Nail. He lets out some of his feral rage by hunting anomalous monsters escaped from the Vault of Time.





	Get in the Wild

**Author's Note:**

> for prompt r:19.14 'wild'

A low growl reverberated around the forest. From the undergrowth, a carpet of birds and small rodents scattered in all directions, chittering their terror. The family of boards huddled together, protecting their young. Even the prowling bear barked a warning and lumbered back into his cave. They didn't know of many predators large enough to be a real threat to them but they recognised the sound of one now it had arrived.

They had sort of known something bad would happen today. The balance of the forest felt all wrong. At first it had been that weird skittering and the sour, rusty smell. Now it was this.

The Gutral guards patrolling the edges of the forest knew exactly what this was all about. Intoning silent blessings to the Beast King, they looked a little more alert but still kept to their patrol. They understood the importance of keeping anyone out who might interfere - mostly for their own sake.

He tracked strange shadows through the boughs - shimmering and flowing, unnaturally fast, the darkness wrapped around it more like an active, living aura than a real shadow. That aura surged and crackled, a threat in itself. It smelled of raw destruction, of the world unraveling itself. He'd encountered it once before, in the Vault of Time. They'd retreated from it, unable to take it on, having a responsibility to protect everyone and the true mission. He had no such weaknesses holding him back now, and no such distractions - no, he reminded himself, shaking his shaggy, fanged head with a growl - he was in great danger if he DIDN'T let all of this out of his system right now, where he couldn't involve anyone he cared about, and it was his most important mission right now, his greatest duty. 

To atone for the mistake he'd made when he'd touched the Beast's Nail at all, had ever gone near the thing. He'd avoided becoming completely lost to it straight away by refusing its 'blessing' but he hadn't escaped all its effects on him. It was old, dark magic. Heiss had told him it came from the Black Chronicle, a particularly nasty by-product of a doomed timeline, intended as a warning. 

The beast he hunted hadn't come from any Chronicle. It was infected by a true anomaly of time and space, a patch degraded by the wear and tear of the entropy in the Universe. It wasn't exactly unnatural - in the way that poison, disease and decay all existed in nature - but its appearance this far 'inland' from the outer reaches of space-time, where the Universe tore itself apart freely and these spiders wove strands of chaos into these dimensional cocoons of their own, was not normal. All the activity lately had left gaps where they trickled inside. Most of them were summarily caught by the Vault's wardens. Except for this one.

This was his prey alone.

Narrowing his eyes until the rest of the world around him no longer existed, he peeled his lips back from his long, sharp fangs, then he leaped. Exploding from the tree's canopy, he landed on the next branch down of the tree opposite, where the enormous dark spider was about to climb the trunk. The two beasts collided, throwing each other out of the tree and rolling to the ground as they slashed, bit, howled and screeched. Razor-sharp talons and mandibles met powerful clawed fists and teeth. The spider was larger but the Gutral was fast and cunning. He had not lost the muscle memory of the martial arts he had trained in all his life, even as his mind became clouded with feral rage - the rapidly expanding wild, blood-red battle aura only lent strength to his deadly technique. Dodging and parrying the thrashing spear-tipped limbs, he struck with a swipe of his claws at the spider's joints, knocking it off balance, then smashed his fists into its red bulbous compound eyes. Acidic yellow ichor spurted from the wounds but he ignored the burning - most of it was absorbed by leather and fur around his hands and wrists anyway - as he continued tearing and snapping, still dodging limbs that now thrashed in a frenzy. 

Once he could see that it was still, sense no more life energy in the vicious thing, he forced himself back, brutally wrenching himself from the urge to feast on his prey, or at least to continue pulling it apart until his visceral urges were sated. Both would be a waste of energy and would potentially hurt him - the thing was unlikely to actually be edible.

"You've had your fun," he growled, "Now its back to serious business."

The beast inside him roared and fought but he wrestled it back down with the promise of a nice, juicy, edible boar steak when they got home. He couldn't win if he fully suppressed it, he realised. Not when he'd been involuntarily drawing from it in battle for this long. It was a constant companion he had to live with, like a barely tame pet he'd adopted when it was young and cute, not realising either that it was mostly not under his control or that it would grow larger than him. 

Gutral warriors had strong wills. He was up to the challenge.


End file.
